For avid recyclers, this is mecca.
Where else could you find one-stop dropping for Tyvek envelopes, wine corks, fishing line, CDs, silverware, half-melted candles, vegetable oil, working and nonworking telephones, three different kinds of batteries, and coat hangers?
And every kind of plastic - not just the ones and twos most facilities accept, but all the way up to seven. (And, yes, the people who come here are fully fluent in the intricate plastics numbering system.)
People get ecstatic about this. "They even take stuff that crinkles!" one regular gushes. (That would be No. 6 plastic, which includes cookie trays and the lids from fast-food drinks.)
This is what radical recycling looks like:
On a Saturday morning, 27 cars have pulled up outside.
The place is only open Tuesday and Saturday mornings, and on an average day, 150 to 200 cars come through.
People are filling carts from their trunks and headed through the gate, where they pay to recycle - $8 a visit.
Marleise Beach has just opened the rear hatch to her Honda Pilot. The innards are full nearly to the roof with bags and boxes of things that four families have been collecting for several months.
Caleb Benjamin is with her, and it was all his idea. He found Crater's place last year and, like so many, knew he had to come back.
But he lives in Philadelphia, and acknowledges that it was "stupid to drive 40 miles with a box." (Although what's really stupid, he adds, is that no place closer does the same thing.)
Benjamin e-mailed some friends. They collect and collect, and when they get enough, one of them makes the trek.
Benjamin and Beach begin to unload. A bag of plastic cups. Two bags of aluminum foil. Metal bottle and jar lids. Plastic lids. A bin of assorted electrical components.
